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Category Archives: online trends

Those who have advocated the release of free ebooks to boost print sales of book titles have been perennially dogged by arguments that they rely too heavily on the anecdote. That is, they tend to hype singular cases of success — the wayward example of a book’s sales rocketing after the viral spread of its ebook counterpart online — without considering the myriad of other factors that may have been …

When Nick Mamatas’s novel, Move Under Ground, was first published, he had the kind of publicity that most small press authors don’t get. A major men’s magazine printed the first chapter as an excerpt. He had positive reviews in The Village Voice,Booklist, and The Believer. He ran a semi-popular blog to give its release extra press. But despite all this, the book only sold moderately …

Understanding the complex network that drives stories to the front page

Last Wednesday at about 11 a.m., tech journalist David Cohn was perusing his RSS reader when he came across an article titled “Measuring the ‘Colbert Bump.” The piece summarized the analysis conducted by a political scientist who wanted to quantitatively measure the effects a politician would see if he were to appear on Comedy Central’s The Colbert …

“This is an exhilarating outer space opera that never slows down especially during the latter quarter of the action-packed story line,” the book review states. “That climax is one of the longest most exciting cat and mouse chase scenes in recent years.”

The review is of Ragamuffin, a speculative fiction novel by Tobias Buckell published by Tor Books. The writer of the review is Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s most prolific …

It has long been understood that the largest liberal blogs have generally producedmore web traffic than the largest conservative blogs. But I have noticed a general trend over the past few months that I didn’t want to write about until the end of the year. After surveying the traffic stats of many major political blogs, I found that web traffic for several major liberal blogs either declined sharply or …

Premise: After reading a Newsweek article that discussed the lack of diversity in the blogosphere, I instantly became fascinated with the discussion of how the semi-anonymous blogosphere’s diversity compares to the diversity of traditional media. When talking about this Newsweek article, several bloggers pointed out that in many cases, you don’t know the race or gender of a blogger, which theoretically means that there is a somewhat-even playing field …

Now, with the widgets, publishers will have the ability to embed content that it on another page of their site, giving StumbleUpon users something else to click on locally, rather than nearly being encouraged to leave. According to a StumbleUpon representative:

The widget is a way for us to offer people a better way to see curated content on a specific Web site that other users have surfaced

Over at JESS3, the creative design agency I work for, I describe how I secured over 100 embeds and thousands of tweets and Facebook shares for a single video:

On January 17 we released both a YouTube version and Vimeo version of the video, and JESS3’s PR team immediately went to work promoting the video to journalists, bloggers and social media users. Using our micro-targeting techniques, we first focused on …

About Bloggasm

Bloggasm is a blog run by Simon Owens that focuses on the media, with an emphasis on online media and journalism. It often features interviews with prominent bloggers, authors and journalists. If you want to request an interview, just drop us a line.